Tar-compression while backing up not working properly

E

Exaweb

Verified User
Joined
Nov 6, 2009
Messages
17
Location
Gram, Denmark
Hi there,

I use the Admin Backup function in admin level to backup users. I run the backup without gzipping the files. (By setting variable backup_gzip=0 in directadmin.conf according to http://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=1220).

I do not gzip them locally on the DA machine, because of a incremental rsync backup script. Saving bandwidth.

Well, now if i download a copy of a users backup file (with .tar extension), the .tar file has the size of 25 MB. If untarring locally on my working machine, OS X calculates the folder to be 29,9 MB. If transferring back to the DA machine and tarring this folder by command "tar -czf user.admin.username.tar user.admin.username" (outside of DA), the compressed tar only has the size of 6 MB.

Something is wrong with the backup process written in DA. Sometimes the users backup tar-file even gets bigger then the original folder.

Why is this happening? It is not only a particularly user, but seems to happen to all users on different DA machines in different levels.
 
Hello,

If you enable gzipping does it work as you described, or does it work good and without mentioned errors?
 
zEitEr said:
Hello,

If you enable gzipping does it work as you described, or does it work good and without mentioned errors?
Click to expand...

Gzipping just works as it should, with an acceptable compression ratio. But in order to save bandwidth, i have to disable gzipping. So this does not fix the problem...
 
OK, I just wanted to know, if it works by you with gzipping enabled, to discard a version of bad hardware.

What about if you run tar manually? Would this work as expected?
 
Yeah, i mentioned that in TS. If i transfer the folder back to the same machine, and run the tar-command manually, it works like a charm.
 
OK, it might be a bug, so you'd better report it as a bug in «Feedback & Feature Requests» sub-forum.
 
Hello,

Is the locally created file the same as the rsynced file? I'm not sure that a plain file.tar we create is actually rsync compatible (I've never tested it, I'm not sure)

Check the local file to see what it looks like.
Check the transferred file to see what it looks like.
Don't use filesize as an accurate measure if the backups were created at different times, as logs can be rotated, emails added/removed, etc..

The best way would be to do a comparison of the contents, eg:
Code: 
tar tzf file.tar > out.txt
on both the local and remote files, then do a diff on the out.txt between them to see what's there or isn't there.


If rsync is not in the picture, do the plain tar files work fine?
I'm still not sure that rsync even works on them.

John
 
Or md5sum, which would tell you if the files were exactly the same, and would be quicker.

Jeff
 
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